Wednesday, August 23, 2006

How to Survive a Lousy Business Presentation

I was cleaning up my office files and ran across a folder of notes from a business conference I attended two weeks after beginning my present job.

I remember writing the sheet posted below. We were about forty minutes into a presentation that was slated to continue another forty. I was certain that I was going to die from boredom. Truly. It seemed inevitable that I would slip, unconscious, beneath the waves of inanity gushing from the speaker, and there expire.

Doodling might have saved me, had I not been seated next to my boss. Scientific evidence suggests that busy hands actually help one's retention rate, but bosses don't care. Bosses always expect one to do the professional thing: keep the eyes forward, nod every so often, and fantasize about sex with a tabloid celebrity.

If you can't do that, and I couldn't, you can pretend to take notes. Doesn't matter what you write, unless your boss has superior eyesight. On this day, the Latin word matella (-ae, f.), which means "chamber pot," popped into my head. Highly appropriate during a presentation that was a pile of crap.

I amused myself by inserting matella into a couple of sentences. Alas, my vocabulary was limited by a curriculum heavy on Caesar.

(Jean and Vivienne, get out your red pens. But be nice. I'm just a grammar school boy.)

If you don't enjoy Latin, letters of resignation in any language are always fun.

50 comments:

I can't be arsed to find Kennedy's Shorter Eating Primer (all ex-school copies are amended thusly), but the grammar looks pretty good. I'd probably fiddle with the word order (like an inflected language needs a specific word order anyway) but that's because of too many years of Cicero.

A classical education is a wonderful thing...and right now I hope no-one in my work's IT section has one, because my passwords have been a selection of the most obscene words I can think of in Latin (I've studied Petronius and Juvenal with a little bit of Martial - I've got enought to keep me going for several years)

I love it. Love it. That's so much better than my habit of conjugating French verbs at the dentist (which is better that the game of, what's in my mouth now?). I have a similar list, though written on hospital chart paper, from a very LONG and BORING afternoon on the renal service when I was a medical student. It's titled "Things that would be a better use of my time than this" and includes things like "pondering the secret life of ducks." Meanwhile I looked like such an attentive and productive almost-doctor...

That's so much more erudite than what I used to do: write the lyrics to an entire song just to see if I could remember them without humming. That little habit kept me awake in many a dull college class, as well as serving to prove to anyone who cared (current count = 0) that I could remember all the words to narrative songs like "Raised on Robbery," but had a slightly harder time with non-narrative ones.

I like the anagram game, where you write a phrase related to your boring meeting - "classified advertising" is a favorite of mine - at the top of your legal pad, and then see how many other words you can make by rearranging the letters. Good times, good times.

Much better than my past time of seeing how well I can write with my non-dominant hand. I do the alphabet, numbers, random words from the conversation or from things printed around me. Amazingly enough, I write pretty well with my right hand now. :) (I'm a lefty.)

What a drag that the drawbacks are dominating the job view today. The perks of the same job may seem a distant memory at this moment, but they tie in directly with my own blog entry today: www.livnletlrn.blogspot.com

My worst presentation experience (Ontario Substance Abuse Bureau - you don't want to know) involved my writing out all the lyrics to Pink Floyd's The Wall. And I mean all the lyrics, all four sides, every song. I still have the booklet somewhere (shudder).

My pass-the-boring-time game is this: write alphabet in a column, one letter per line, then randomly write down a letter in front of each. The challenge: to think of a famous person with those initials, that's 26 famous people in all. You can make the game harder (or impossible) by initially limiting it to living people or artists or writers or whatever.

Ahhh, another thing in common. I took 3 years of Latin in HS and another 3 in college...can I remember much of it without a reference...absolutely not. The last thing I tried to translate was some "greek" text. You know lorum ipsum....

You need an alpha-numberic pager. I used to spend boring meetings paging other people in the room or out of it. The group of us had a code word which meant "I'm going to go postal, so please leave the building before I shoot everyone on site." PARAMICIUM. In fact, it meant, "Please Page me back so I can claim an emergency and leave this stupid meeting."

Franklin, I am a little behind, so this comment really goes with a previous blog. I was the woman who mouthed "I love your blog" in line at the Thursday night Stitches preview. Thanks for the thanks. I kept catching glimpses of you throughout the weekend, but was afraid if I approached you, you would think I was either a) a stalker or b) insane. It was lovely to meet you, if from afar. Your blog often helps keep me sane.Renée

Tiffany not only explored the various jewelry processes of the time, Silver Tiffanybut also branched out into new metals, such as platinum, Tiffany Jewelrywhich at the time was considered very hard to manipulate.Tiffany BraceletsIt seems to be the case that unusual colorations appealed to Tiffany, like the opal.He also preferred gemstones that were either opaque or translucent. Tiffany EarringsTurquoise, jade, carnelian, lapis, moonstones, and opals were all chosen for their ability to filter light. Tiffany NecklacesEmphasis based on color was very prevalent in his works.

Copyright and Posting Notice

All original content of this blog, both words and images, is held in copyright by F. Habit. Use of any kind, in any medium, for any reason without express, prior written consent is prohibited.

Permission is not granted for the posting of any content from this site to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or any other Web site.

Please do not provide links to any product, service, organization or cause when leaving comments unless directly related to the topic of the post. Unsolicited advertising will be deleted and repeat offenders will be blocked.

When in doubt, please ask. I'm not mean, I'm just committed to preserving the quality of experience for my readers.